Post Tagged 'music'

With its subject, use of Scripture, and majestic soaring choruses, George Ferederic Handel’s Messiah is easily the most recognizable musical piece in Western Civilization. It is also perhaps the most widely performed piece of classical or choral music in the West. Continue Reading...

In this week’s Acton Commentary, “Work and Prayer: Of Coins, Sheep, and Men,” I explore what the parable of the Prodigal Son (when read in conjunction with the parables of the Lost Coin and the Lost Sheep) has to teach us about stewardship:
Reading these three stories together teaches us many things about the nature of God’s love for us, such that when we were lost, “While we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8 NIV). Continue Reading...

The film Lt. Dan Band for the Common Good kicks off with the Abraham Lincoln quote, “Honor to him, who braves for the common good.” The words are appropriate. In 2003, wanting to do even more for America’s service men and women, Gary Sinise formed the Lt. Continue Reading...

L’Accorche-Choeur, Ensemble vocal Fribourg. Veni, Veni Emmanuel is a synthesis of the great “O Antiphons” that are used for Vespers during the octave before Christmas (Dec. 17-23). These antiphons are of ancient origin and date back to at least the ninth century. Continue Reading...

Last night the American Music Awards were televised on ABC. Among the big winners were alumni of the hit TV show, “American Idol,” whose stars won 3 AMAs.
Kid Rock, the Rock N Roll “Jesus.”
But there was another kind of “idol” on display at the AMAs, as Detroit’s own Kid Rock was a presenter and did a spoof of his fight with rocker Tommy Lee in a comedy bit with host Jimmy Kimmel. Continue Reading...

O for a thousand tongues to sing
My great Redeemer’s praise,
The glories of my God and King,
The triumphs of His grace!
The great hymn writer Charles Wesley was born three hundred years ago in 1707. Continue Reading...

There once was a time when it was, in practice at least, more difficult and costly to copy videocassette tapes than it was music tapes, compact discs, or computer programs. That, in part, is the justification for how the US Copyright code treats music and computer software differently than, say, movies. Continue Reading...

Many of you may have already heard of the new line of Levi’s jeans due out later this year, the iPod compatible RedWire DLX jeans: “With a joystick remote control built into the watch pocket, the new jeans will allow wearers to play, pause, track forward or back and adjust the volume on their iPods without having to take them out of their pockets.” There is also a built-in pocket designed to “conceal the bulge of the iPod.”
But Levi Strauss is a bit late to the concealment racket, at least as far as the iPod is concerned, since iPod-friendly underwear produced by Play, wittily named the iBoxer, is currently ready to ship. Continue Reading...

The Real Clear Politics Blog passes along an op-ed from Bob Herbert, “Blowing the Whistle on Gangsta Culture,” a NYT Select item (subscription required). In the column, Herbert discusses the “profoundly self-destructive cultural influences that have spread like a cancer through much of the black community and beyond.”
Tom Bevan calls the piece “suprisingly candid,” and “some stiff, righteous stuff – all the more impressive coming from the source.” Herbert, of course, has been a NYT columnist since 1993, and Bevan thinks that “If Herbert is disgusted with the current state of black leadership in America then we may indeed have reached a tipping point.”
Acton research fellow Anthony Bradley has written widely on the moral status of rap culture. Continue Reading...